Sometimes people assume that I am up early every morning, putting the finishing touches on a moat, and then press send right as the clock ticks to five. That is not how it works. I write them a day or two ahead, and then perch them in a queue waiting for a computer in another town to wake up and pour them into people's inboxes as the sun comes up. It's magic. Letters and pictures fly through the air and land without scrambling in seven hundred addresses. Or maybe computers don't sleep. And come to think of it, the sun keeps changing its mind about when to come around the bend. Moats always go out at five. 

This can make me out of step with what has happened on a local or national level by the time they are opened. Sorry about that. 

There is a new president in this country. Frankly I am taken aback. But this is not a political forum, so I will spare you further details. Except to say that I have noticed the gap between what I knew when and what you know now. When I say "Ready, set..." to these few paragraphs, it will represent an instant when all I know is what I know. But when the server says "GO!" it will be farther along on the ribbon that is called time, and you will be privy to more specifics than I was when I clicked the last period.  

That is how it works. 

Even though the fifty nine years that I have been breathing can seem as expansive as a Kansas prairie, they are a blink. Less than a blink. There are graphics that illustrate the blinkiness of my lifetime, or the lifetime of this country, or the presence of humans on this planet. A planet which can seem enormous if you happen to be a butterfly, or a commuter train, or a mountain trying to cling to a moving object. But planets are small too, as anyone who has looked out the window of a space shuttle knows. 

When I take a mental snapshot of my marriage, or family, or government, the perspective I have is finite. It does not and cannot take into account what will happen in the next frame. But there is Someone who can. And does. 

Even as you know today what I did not know yesterday, God's awareness stretches back through forty five presidencies, and forward through the next millennium. Longer. And while it can feel like He changes His mind as quickly as the sunrise, it is actually we who fluctuate. He is as constant as the source of warmth for our solar system. It is we who move away. 

That is how it works. Because God never sleeps.